During the evening portion of the second day of the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway, Chevrolet gave a behind the scenes look at how their new Chevrolet SS was developed. The talk of the tour, and everyone this season, is returning to NASCAR’s roots with the hopes of once again proving that winning on Sunday means that cars will be sold on Monday. The management team at Chevy also said that their car “puts the stock, in stock car racing.” Tony Stewart mentioned earlier on the tour that fans will be surprised how closely the street car is similar to the race car. The street car will be unveiled later next month on the day of the Sprint Unlimited at Daytona International Speedway at 1PM in the Fan Zone. This is the first time that Chevrolet will be racing a car that is not available for sale when the cars hit the track.
Pat Suhy, GM Development Manager, lead his team at Chevrolet to develop the new NASCAR Cup car for Team Chevy. The process of developing entire new cars was a long road, with this process starting well over five years ago. It took about 4-5 on Suhy’s team but tons more from the staff at Hendrick Motorsports, who developed the new car from scratch, to the team at NASCAR working with Chevrolet on making a great looking race car. In late 2009 Hendrick started working on the first design of the car which was taken to Detroit for upper management to take a look over. Two years later, from 2011 till the middle of last season, Chevrolet was working with NASCAR to make sure that the new SS would follow their guidelines and vision for the new Gen 6 cars.
Chevrolet noted that the new car has a lot of new parts and will be one of the most unique cars they have ever had on the track. With over 30 parts just special to Chevrolet, the manufacture is going to have a lot more work to do. The previous Car of Tomorrow only had six to separate the competition including the decklid and hood. This season the decklids will be produced from one third party that NASCAR is working with and they will be out of carbon fiber. One of the reasons that the switch to carbon fiber is to make the cars weigh less and have better aerodynamics, but carbon fiber is also harder to temper with compared to sheet metal. Shuy said he is, “confident that everyone can go out and win” this season and “every car are going to look different, we want differentiation.”
The new Chevy SS will have a tough first year as team Ford looks to be leading the way so far based on testing numbers, but Chevy believes they have a great car that will compete. The race car also “does help with (development of the) street car.” Chevrolet again is hoping that this returns to the motto of win Sunday sell Monday and allows manufacture pride rises again in NSCAR this season. “People are loyal to their brand, they use our product to get to the track,” Suhy included in his presentation. Coming off their tenth consecutive manufactures championship in the NASCAR Cup series and sweeping all three in the top NASCAR series, this season looks strong for the Chevrolet camp as they go out to compete with Ford and Toyota.
For more photos from the media tour please click HERE.
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